News release from Motley Fool

It's Official: British Banks Are Bad!

By Laura Starkey When I turned on the news yesterday morning, I had one of those "no shock, Sherlock!" moments -- and I imagine many other Fools did, too. According to a new report from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), the UK's current account market is "not serving customers well", thanks to the prevalence of poor credit interest rates, outrageous overdraft charges and the opaqueness of companies' terms and conditions. Well I never! Sarcasm aside, in today's Summer Lolly I'll outline the OFT's key findings -- and suggest how you could get more from your current account.

What's all the fuss about? Banks seem to be competing...

To the naked eye, it certainly looks that way. Banks base expensive ad campaigns around encouraging us to move our business -- and one even pens jolly ditties telling us about its 'extra' interest rates.

Since the credit crunch, banks have sought to attract more customer deposits -- so some, such as Alliance & Leicester, Abbey and Lloyds TSB, have offered customers great rates of credit interest.

According to the OFT, though, the system's still not good enough. Its report, Personal Current Accounts In The UK, states that a whopping 88% of current accounts in 2006 received an annual interest rate of less than 0.5%.

Meanwhile, banks made around £8.3bn from their current account customers -- more revenue than they earned from savings accounts and credit cards combined.

The report suggests that the current account market features two types of competitor: 'established banks' (such as RBS, HSBC, Barclays and Lloyds TSB) and 'challengers' like Abbey and Alliance & Leicester. (Abbey's owner, Santander, is probably going to buy Alliance & Leicester in the next few weeks.) While both camps try to compete on grounds of quality, challengers are more likely to compete on credit interest and fees, too. Yet despite their efforts, established banks still have a 65% share of the current account market. So why aren't people switching? There's a variety of reasons why people have stuck with bum-deal bank accounts. Firstly, as the OFT points out, banks don't give clear enough information about their charges, interest rates and rules. This makes it difficult to compare accounts comprehensively, and could put people off switching. But perhaps more importantly, people in the UK don't trust their bank to manage a current account switch effectively. Only 6% of those surveyed by the OFT had moved their account within the past 12 months -- and 45% of people who hadn't said it was because they were 'not very' or 'not at all' confident the process would go smoothly. Despite the fact that far fewer than 45% of customers actually experience problems changing current accounts, bank switches have made a bad impression on us Brits. The result is nicely summed up by research from both Smile and Age Concern -- whose separate studies show people are more likely to divorce their partner than ditch their bank! Should my money and I stay put? In my opinion, that depends on how happy you are with your bank. Is the customer service spiffing? Does it pay you a premium, or pathetic, rate of credit interest? If you're often in the red, is your overdraft reasonably priced or extortionately expensive? I think that unless you can honestly give positive answers to all these questions, you've little to lose and a lot to gain by switching your current account. Is the customer service spiffing? Does it pay you a premium, or pathetic, rate of credit interest? If you're often in the red, is your overdraft reasonably priced or extortionately expensive? In the absence of any objective system for measuring the quality of banks' customer service, in my opinion the only 'scientific' way to search the market is to look for a bank account that pays a good rate of credit interest. This is especially worth considering at the moment, when many of us are feeling the pinch. If you move from a bank that's currently paying a poor rate of interest to a market-leading equivalent, you could earn hundreds of pounds in extra interest this year. Bag a better bank account! Below, I've rounded up three market-leading bank accounts -- all of which will pay you truckloads more interest on credit balances than the majority of current accounts available. Bank Current Account Credit Interest Rate (AER) Funding Requirement (Monthly) Alliance & Leicester Premier Direct Current Account 8.5% £500 Abbey Current Account 8% £1,000 Lloyds TSB Classic Plus Current Account 6% £1,000 As you can see, Alliance & Leicester's Premier Direct Current Account is still the most generous on the market, offering a whopping 8.5% credit interest. It also trumps the other two in terms of the amount customers are required to pay into the account each month -- the lower minimum means the account is accessible to more people. However, all three of these accounts place an upper limit of £2,500 on balances -- so be aware that if you hold more than this in your account, the interest rate you earn on that 'extra' portion will be tiny. Also, it's worth noting that all these great rates are variable -- so there's no guarantee you'll earn this level of interest for the life of the account. Overall, although I think the OFT's findings are unsurprising, I do hope its report has an impact on how banks do business. In the meantime, the best thing we can do as customers is refuse to accept shoddy service and paltry rates of interest. The more people that switch, the clearer this message to Britain's bad-guy banks will be!

OFT News Update

The Office of Fair Trading: Personal current account market not working well for consumers, says OFT

Let me be one of the first on cag to officially say woohoo. and Finally the OFt relase a judgement.

Let me be one of the first on cag to officially say woohoo. and Finally the OFt relase a judgement.

It's only a report, not a judgement. Only a court can do that.

The Stay was put in place so the oft can consider the charges.

Here we go.

woohoo

• the aggregate revenue of banks from personal current accounts (PCAs) was approx £8.3bn - £152 per active account
  
• personal current accounts generate more revenue for banks than savings and credit cards combined
  
• insufficient fund charges have increased by an average of 17 per cent in real terms between 2003 and 2007
  
• when banks were asked to calculate how much a hypothetical customer would have to pay in a given scenario (which included exceeding an agreed overdraft limit), the reported charges varied from £0 to £260
  
• the average daily unarranged overdraft balance in 2006 was £680m. Paid item and maintenance fees totalled some £1.5bn - which would equate to a return of over 220 per cent on the average balance
  
• there is significant potential for slight errors in financial management to result in hundreds of pounds of charges
  
• over 12.6 million accounts (23 per cent of active accounts) incurred at least one insufficient funds charge in 2006
  
• those consumers who incurred a charge were more likely to incur at least six charges than just one
  
• four million accounts incurred charges of over £200 in 2006, of which 1.4 million accounts incurred charges of over £500, and
  
• in a survey conducted for the study over a fifth of consumers were unaware of the existence of charges until they had incurred one.
  

The Stay was put in place so the oft can consider the charges.

Here we go.

 

woohoo

The stay will *probably* stay in place until the test case is over at the court. It was put in place because of the case, not the OFT report.

Market study into personal current accounts

16 July 2008

The OFT has published its market study report into personal current accounts (PCA) in the UK.

The report found that much of banks’ revenue from current accounts is derived from largely hidden charges, with 81 per cent of income coming from insufficient fund charges (£2.6bn) and net credit interest income (£4.1bn). Yet a significant number of customers do not know how much they actually pay in bank charges, either before or after they are incurred, and more than three quarters do not know the credit interest rate of their current account.

Download Personal current accounts in the UK - an OFT market study (1.2 mb)

Download the executive summary (146 kb)

The OFT has now launched a consultation exercise to invite comments from stakeholders on the high level concerns identified in the report.

Download Personal current accounts market study - a consultation paper (137 kb)

Download annexes to report (all pdf files):

Annexe A - Legal and regulatory framework (187 kb)

Annexe B - Summary report of review of information banks provide to consumers and of price comparison sites (101 kb)

Annexe C - Free-if-in-credit personal current accounts (250 kb)

Annexe D - Personal current account consumer research (589 kb)

Annexe E - Psychology of personal current accounts (170 kb)

Annexe F - Public policy context (87 kb)

See press release

Download market study questions and answers (103 kb)